Gerard Casey – författare

We're all in favour of free speech — except when we’re not! Often it’s a case of 'free speech for me, but not for thee’. The regulation of speech is a matter that is typically dealt with arbitrarily without there being any obvious principled basis for the decisions that are made. Is hate speech, so-called, a form of free speech? What of blasphemy, in either its ancient or contemporary forms? Should certain forms of speech be mandatory?

As with free speech, we’re all in favour of tolerance — except when we're not! Tolerance is increasingly coming to seem, well, intolerable and new and improved forms of intolerance are everywhere on the rise, not least as embodied in the currently fashionable doctrines of diversity, inclusion and equality.

In ZAP, Gerard Casey presents a critical and unified approach to both free speech and tolerance based on the Zero Aggression Principle, keeping the critical discussion topical and grounded by reference to current events.

In After #MeToo, Gerard Casey provides a critical assessment of the #MeToo movement, situating it in the context of the radical feminism of which it is just the latest manifestation. Apart from its legitimating an indiscriminate attack on men and masculinity, Casey argues that the #MeToo movement has exposed a conceptual fault-line in radical feminist anthropology. Are women fully-developed moral agents, able to exercise moral choice and to take responsibility for what they do; or are women elements of a collective made up of the victims of sexual crimes, whose suffering is not just that of any one individual woman but of the group as a whole?

Casey's analysis of the #MeToo movement is prefaced by a brief typology of forms of feminism and by an account of the supposedly universal oppression of women by a malign patriarchy. He argues that if there is such a thing as the patriarchy, it is singularly and spectacularly ineffectual in its operation inasmuch as women, on the whole, are not only not oppressed in comparison to men but are rather the beneficiaries of legal and social privileges.

After #MeToo concludes with a consideration of the changing legal definitions of rape. Once understood to be essentially a crime of violence, rape has now come to be regarded as a violation of personal autonomy. In common law systems, a certain conception of consent is now central to the definition of rape, a conception that, Casey argues, is unworkable, at once infantilising women and, at the same time, potentially criminalising every sexual encounter in which a man is involved.

In Hidden Agender, Gerard Casey develops a timely and provocative defence of free speech and toleration against the transgenderist ideology that has infiltrated so much of the media, the political establishment and the law.

Opposing ideas, not individuals, Hidden Agender provides a compelling critique of the transgender ideologists and trans activists, and the new reactionary form of legal intolerance of our right to free thought and free speech.

As a libertarian, Casey believes that we should be free to say and do whatever we wish provided that, in so doing, we do not perpetrate violence, or threaten to perpetrate violence, against the person or property of another. The fundamental objection is rather to individuals being forced, on pain of legal or social sanctions, to believe (or to pretend to believe) what to them is patently false, namely, that a man can become a woman or a woman a man, and to be legally obliged to treat those who claim to have transitioned from one sex to another as if they really had managed to do so.

Drawing on extensive research, both scientific and anecdotal, Hidden Agender is a robust defence of free speech and tolerance against the combined forces of prejudice, wokeness and legal intimidation.